Six Ideas from Administrative Staff Development Programme

On June 17, the project concepts of the next enrolment of the HSE Professional Development Programme for Administrative Staff (PDP) were defended. The vote by the programme’s Expert Council and the open vote by HSE staff supported the project ideas of all six teams.

Read on to learn about the projects that may be implemented at the University in the near future.

Yulia Grinkevich
Head of the HSE Professional Development Programme for Administrative Staff (PDP)

PDP is a field of opportunities, new professional networks, professional development, and, accordingly, responsibility. The programme participants choose their project ideas, expand them, and defend their concepts in an open defence process.

This year, despite the fact that we have organized the defence online for the first time, it attracted a record number of experts, which, I believe, demonstrates the relevance of the project ideas suggested by the participants.

We are grateful to all our colleagues for their interest in the projects and the support. Congratulations to the ASDP members and best of luck in implementing the projects!

Project: ‘HSE University Media Archive’

Head: Anna Reznikova

We came up with the idea of a media archive when we were preparing materials for the HSE University Life website. It turned out that even for us, it’s difficult to find photos and videos from the university history: many materials have not been digitalized, and some of them, such as the very first HSE-related media, seemed impossible to obtain at all.

I came with this idea to the first PDP external workshop, and I found people here from different HSE departments who supported the idea, and I would probably never would have met them if it hadn’t been for PDP.

Thanks to the support of PDP experts, we changed the initial idea a bit (for example, we abandoned the idea of a museum and focused on the idea of an archive). We believe it is important to create a hub, where photos, videos and texts about the university history will be collected, and members of the HSE family (including those who work and study here, as well as those who graduated long ago) will be able to find information they need easily.

It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, but such an archive will be a perfect foundation for other projects. I believe it will help students and teachers to implement their ideas related to the university history.

We will be happy if HSE students and staff support the implementation of our idea. If you can make archives, create multimedia historical projects or are simply interested in HSE history and want to join us, please contact us via email at areznikova@hse.ru.

Project: ‘Professional Development Kit’

Head: Igor Palkin

The idea evolved during a brainstorm at the first external PDP workshop in Voronovo. Our team suggested three ideas, which passed the initial selection, but only one ‘survived’ in the next enrolment of participants.

The idea is pertinent to all the team participants, since we came to PDP to grow professionally and learn to adjust to the changing environment more quickly. The university offers lots of opportunities for professional development, but not everyone knows about them, and some of them are still unavailable to administrative staff.

We hope that the implementation of our project will help our colleagues (and ourselves) to find these opportunities for successful work in a fast and convenient manner. We are going to create a personified unified catalogue of programmes/courses, which will help the administrative staff to improve their skills and get new ones.

Today, we are at the stage of gathering information about educational opportunities and designing the format of building the project in the new HSE Personal Account.

Project: ‘Social Navigator’

Head: Oleg Popov

Initially, we called our team ‘The Third Mission’. Without any preliminary agreement, all the participants advocated for the idea that HSE University offers lots of socially important projects – at the university, on campus, at the faculty and department level – and it would be great to create a single entry point for them on the university website.

We got inspired with the idea that such an entry point in the form of a navigator would become, first, a perfect tool to popularize our social mission both within the university and beyond it; second, it would help attract more students and staff to socially important projects; and third, it would become an incentive to bring together other activity areas of HSE, which are internationally known as the ‘third mission’. They include projects related to knowledge transfer, continuous education, technology and innovation transfer, and more.

This led us to the idea to create a page on the HSE University website that provides clear information for staff about university events related to the social mission, with an opportunity to join projects, get updates about new ones, publish information on their own projects, and invite other staff members to join.

Today, we are in the process of auditing all the projects and events that have something to do with the social mission, so that by December, we will create a full database and start developing the tool itself.

We will be happy to hear any suggestions on the contents of our social navigator, and everyone is welcome to join its development.

Project: ‘Developing HSELife Mobile App’

Head: Eugene Rodionov

I had the idea in 2019, when I was taking continuing education courses for HSE staff. Our team suggested and defended a mobile app project, which helps people who like the same sport find each other.

I suggested this idea during the first external PDP workshop in January 2020, and my future project team partners got interested in it. We developed it and agreed that HSE University lacks a unified digital environment where staff members can find and pursue opportunities beyond their professional responsibilities.

We believe that a special mobile app could help solve this problem. As we were working on the project concept, we found a lot of supporters for our idea among HSE staff.

Today, we are preparing for the technical implementation of the project by creating a mobile app prototype. The management of the HSE IT Office has already agreed to help us with this. We are also continuing to expand the project ideology, which is expanding the horizontal links between HSE students and staff.

Despite the informal character of the project, we believe that it solves a very important task for the university – it unites HSE students and staff around mutual interests, reveals their creative and cultural potential.

We will be grateful to everyone for any ideas regarding the app development and project implementation at large. If you have any interesting suggestions, please contact me via email at erodionov@hse.ru.

Project: ‘CRM Steps’

Head: Olga Burlak

The idea of our project has evolved from a project by one of the previous PDP courses – ‘CRM Pilots’, as part of which the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system has already started to be implemented at the Advising Centre for prospective international students.

The CRM Steps project aims to popularize CRM for a wider circle of interested people. Our team consists of staff from different departments and campuses, who have a lot of contacts daily and would like to manage this communication effectively. As a result of our project, we would like to share our CRM experience with anyone who is interested but doesn’t know how to do it, as well as to those who doubt whether they need this system.

During this year, we are going to install CRM in our departments, with the support of the colleagues from the HSE IT Office, and thus create an operational tool, which is ready for use in other departments with similar functions in the same format, or with minor adjustments.

In the future, we are going to create a guide for other departments, which will help them learn more about the tasks that the system solves and the best practices that are ready for use. We also welcome everyone interested in the use of CRM. Please contact us to get some advice or to offer your ideas on the project development - oburlak@hse.ru.

Project: ‘Seven Keys for Academic Supervision’

Head: Elena Kabaeva

We came up with the idea of a handbook for new academic supervisors, because we understood that the staff of our university has already accumulated a wealth of experience with academic programme supervision that can and must be systematized, described, and published as a manual, which will be particularly useful for new academic supervisors. Since we are going to actively involve current academic supervisors in our work, we hope that this will promote the development of a community of academic supervisors.

Since the external workshop in Voronovo, we agreed that the handbook would consist of seven (a magical number!) chapters, describing the key areas of academic supervisors’ work. We conducted several meetings, first of all, with current academic supervisors, in order to understand what these chapters should be. We also met with the HSE IT Office and discussed possible technological solutions.

Our plans for the near future are to prepare the contents for one of the handbook chapters and get feedback on it from our academic colleagues.

We welcome any suggestions and comments on our project.

August 18, 2020

HSE People